6 replies to this topic

[dinscurge]

well ive tried debian stable like 2 weeks ago which was debian 504 which was pretty much depricated being 2.6.26 kernel (2 years old and counting) no ext4 support so i tried debian testing but like when i tried gentoo whenever i use a weekly release cd i get random errors. like when i tried debian testing some one broke parted as it couldnt part a sun disklabel it just messed it up, made all the parts like 1/2 the size indicated so id end up from supposed to being like 100mb /boot, 2gb swap, then like 34gb for /. (36gb drive) end up being 100mb 14gb free space, 14gb /, 1gb free space, 1gb swap. and as i had debain stable working just fine, it was specific to testing obviously. so the question is anyone have any suggestions on how to get a weekly release cd working?

edit: its for my newish sun ultra60 2x360mhz ultrasparc II's with 4mbl2 per, and 1796mb of ram with dual 36gb scsi drives, dual ethernet nic's fiber optic card, usb, sound, video card (not the one that takes up both slots) so i was planning on using it on a dailyish basis so i want to be able to run programs newer than 2 years old

Edited by dinscurge, 07 July 2010 - 01:13 AM.

[vulture]

Ah yes,

The ultra 60. I've found overtime that sometimes the scsi cdroms give allot of errors during installation and aren't so cheap to replace . Which is why I go with network based installation methods on
sparc equipment to rule out any chance of silent media/drive errors(btw you're standard intel gig nics that are PCI PCI-X will run perfectly in sparc boxen provided your OS is up to date). Fortunately newer Sunblade 100s, 150s , 1500s 2500s and a few in between have eide buses making it easier to replace optical drives. Aside from running Debian , you could just Run Solaris
or Open Solaris (or at the very least a random BSD*) OpenCSW , blastwave and a few others have modern linux software ports . Exim for example runs pretty smooth on Sparc (though admittedly you won't find dpkg available but instead more simplified conf files under /opt/XXX software directories. ) And regardless if you Run Solaris or your choice of GNU or BSD OS distro , the sparc arch isn't always going to have the latest greatest GNU packages available . for 100% compat with the latest software out there, Intel arch is pretty much the way to go, however if you're brave, Sun studio makes for a great porting tool assuming you don't mind porting code yourself and dealing with any headaches that arise.

Edited by vulture, 07 July 2010 - 02:10 AM.

[dinscurge]

nah its not the cdrom, the guy i bought it from changed it out for a plextor . never had a problem getting the cdrom working, the only problem i've had is testing sometimes tries to mount /dev/cdrom so i have to point it to /dev/sr0 but then it works fine, till get to using parted where it just messess up the part. table. wanted linux not just for the newer programs, but then it has all the same modules as if i was using x86 so i could use any pci/pci-x that linux has support for, where solaris doesnt have very many drivers for 3rd party stuff besides usb/nic/raid. has openbsd on it now worked fine of course. dont much care for gnome if i wanted windows xp id plugin a sun penguin card with solaris and have it as a quest os,

edit: tyring the new debian 6.0 alpha1 netinst.

Edited by dinscurge, 07 July 2010 - 03:55 PM.

[dinscurge]

o well got the alpha release net inst working. parted was still messed up/messed up my drive but it installed silo properly so it worked fine using gentoominimal for fdisk. mounted sdb1(30gb) as /var/www. has 2.6.32.2 which is not the newest kernel but its up to date with what the average user would have so its fine, just didnt want it being 2 years old.

[vulture]

o well got the alpha release net inst working. parted was still messed up/messed up my drive but it installed silo properly so it worked fine using gentoominimal for fdisk. mounted sdb1(30gb) as /var/www. has 2.6.32.2 which is not the newest kernel but its up to date with what the average user would have so its fine, just didnt want it being 2 years old.

Not bad,
You had dual 36gbs right? Setup a software raid 1 on it ?

[dinscurge]

yeah have dual 36gb's nah never set up raid on a sun before so wouldnt know how Xp

[vulture]

Well,

fortunately a software raid on an x86 Debian box at the OS level is more or less the same even for Debian running on Sparc.
Partitioning managers/volume managers dmraid or mdadm on Linux aside,

if you install Solaris and select ZFS as your FS of choice during installation, the rpool "/"
zfs pool will by default select both drives into a ZFS raid 1 .


bash-3.00# zpool status
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t1d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0

Then again thats Solaris

Heres some links I've compiled for further study on software raid on linux+sparc

http://heimdall.netp...n-netra-x1-raid

http://www.mail-arch...g/msg00128.html

http://blog.agdunn.net/?p=28

ZFS seems to make software raid on Linux look like a pain in the ass in comparison .